The Ontology of Events; a Critical Analysis of Davidson's Argument

Events are things that occur or happen. Although it is just in the contemporary metaphysics that the philosophical debate on events has become prominent, its initial origins could be found in the ancient philosophy as the issues of motion and of the Aristotelian categories of action and affection. The main recent debates concerning the events can be divided into three major problems: existence, characterization and identity. Donald Davidson has engaged into all these three issues. His most important argument for the existence of the events possesses an ontological and semantic aspect. He argues that ordinary predicate logic fails to support the intuitional validity of the inference of the action sentences with less qualification (i.e., containing fewer amounts of adverbs) from those with more qualification. In order to remedy this deficiency we must paraphrase these sentences as ones containing quantification over specific actions (events) and this, according to Quine’s well-known criterion of ontological commitment leads to the existence of events. Davidson’s approach has been objected in several ways some of them are so serious that do not seem to leave much plausibility for his argument.